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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:24:33 GMT 10
Thursday’s Quotes:Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpoints to hack post-horses
When I am traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that ideas flow best and most abundantly
Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, I hear them all at once. What a delight this is! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream
My subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and define, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statute, at a glance
One must not make oneself cheap here — that is a cardinal point — or else one is done. Whoever is most impertinent has the best chance
To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop
I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelingsBro. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Austrian composer (Born this day 1791) Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:25:22 GMT 10
My heart is like a singing bird
Love came down at Christmas; love all lovely, love divine; love was born at Christmas, stars and angels gave the sign
I might show facts as plain as day: But since your eyes are blind, you'd say, "Where? What?" and turn away
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads the wind is passing by
Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun
Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend
The downhill path is easy, but there's no turning backChristina RossettiEnglish poet ( Goblin Market) (Born this day 1830) Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:28:56 GMT 10
Nothing succeeds like success
All generalizations are dangerous, even this one
I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest
A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it
It is almost as difficult to keep a first class person in a fourth class job, as it is to keep a fourth class person in a first class job
How is it that little children are so intelligent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it
All human wisdom is summed up in two words; wait and hopeBro. Alexandre DumasFrench writer ( The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo) (Died this day 1870) All for one and one for all
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:30:22 GMT 10
I so much like real things — the realities that come naturally from the depths of us like — what shall I say? — the way trees grow, from some inner essential principle of them, just expressing itself
The question is whether personal freedom is worth the terrible effort, the never-lifted burden and risks of self-reliance
This is the nature of human energy; individuals generate it, and control it. Each person is self- controlling, and therefore responsible for his acts. Every human being, by his nature, is free
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It cannot even make me read Spengler, if I'd rather read a pulp magazine
It was not seen that woman’s place was in the home until she began to go out of it; the state- ment was a reply to an unspoken challenge, it was attempted resistance to irresistible change
Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we — because we don’t question these things. And science is the enemy because it is the questioner. Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted
Even the street, the sunshine, the very air had a special Sunday quality. We walked differently on Sundays, with greater propriety and stateliness. Greetings were more formal, more subdued, voices more meticulously polite. Everything was so smooth, bland, polished. And genuinely so, because this was Sunday. In church the rustling and the stillness were alike pervaded with the knowledge that all was for the best. Propriety ruled the universe. God was in His Heaven, and we were in our Sunday clothesRose Wilder LaneAmerican journalist, travel writer, novelist and political theorist (Born this day 1886) I'm not "filled with my art". I ain't got no art. I've got only a kind of craftsman's skill, and make stories as I make biscuits or embroider underwear or wrap up packages
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:31:15 GMT 10
A man should never neglect his family for business
Crowded classrooms and half-day sessions are a tragic waste of our greatest national resource — the minds of our children
Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language
I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter
Or heritage and ideals, our code and standards — the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings
I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained
It's kind of fun to do the impossibleWalt Disney, DeMolay Brother American animator (Mickey Mouse) (Born this day 1901) Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret, it seems to me, can be summarized in four C s. They are curiosity, confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:32:28 GMT 10
Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables
What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal
I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language
Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word "understanding." Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality
Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the objectWerner HeisenbergGerman physicist (Uncertainty Principle, Nobel 1932) (Born this day 1901) Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it — more correctly — the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:33:28 GMT 10
We tell ourselves stories in order to live
Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self-respect springs
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, singular power of self-respect
To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self
Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dreamJoan DidionAmerican journalist and novelist (Born this day 1934) I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 5, 2013 9:34:17 GMT 10
Did you ever see a mob rush across town to do a good deed?
A lie is an act of theft. It steals peoples’ faith and makes them resent themselves
We decry violence all the time in this country, but look at our history. We were born in a violent revolution, and we've been in wars ever since. We're not a pacific people
New Orleans was always America's netherworld, a sexual playground, like the Baths of Caracalla at the bottom of a Puritan country. Its history is emblematic of every event that has occurred in our history — the pre-Revolutionary colonial era, the age of exploration, and slavery, extermination of native Americans, and then of course the war between the states, it's all right there in the city of New Orleans
I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist
When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily
How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?James Lee BurkeAmerican novelist (Dave Robicheaux series) (Born this day 1936) The story of Ulysses and Agamemnon and Menelaus, of Jesus, of the Good Knight of Chaucer, lives in every one of us
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others
We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image
Does anybody really think that they didn't get what they had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment?
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear
It is said that no-one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones
Let there be work, bread, water and salt for allNelson MandelaSouth African President (ANC) Knight of St. John & Nobel laureate (Peace 1993) (Died this day 2013) No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 6, 2013 6:57:11 GMT 10
Friday’s Quotes:If you cannot make knowledge your servant, make it your friend
Some marry the first information they receive, and turn what comes later into their concubine. Since deceit is always first to arrive, there is no room left for truth
Those who want to look like hard workers give the impression that they aren't up to their jobs
Politeness and a sense of honor have this advantage: we bestow them on others without losing a thing
Honorable beginnings should serve to awaken curiosity, not to heighten people's expectations. We are much better off when reality surpasses our expectations, and something turns out better than we thought it would
Better to be cheated by the price than by the merchandise
Readiness is the mother of luckBaltasar GraciánSpanish Jesuit author ( The Art of Worldly Wisdom) (Died this day 1658) When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see
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Post by Tamrin on Dec 6, 2013 7:02:31 GMT 10
There will be and can be no rest till we admit, what cannot be denied, that there is in man a third faculty, which I call simply the faculty of apprehending the Infinite, not only in religion, but in all things; a power independent of sense and reason, a power in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason; but yet, I suppose, a very real power, if we see how it has held its own from the beginning of the world — how neither sense nor reason has been able to overcome it, while it alone is able to overcome both reason and sense
The position which believers and unbelievers occupy with regard to their various forms of faith is very much the same all over the world. The difficulties which trouble us, have troubled the hearts and minds of men as far back as we can trace the beginnings of religious life. The great problems touching the relation of the Finite to the Infinite, of the human mind as the recipient, and of the Divine Spirit as the source of truth, are old problems indeed
He must be a man of little faith, who would fear to subject his own religion to the same critical tests to which the historian subjects all other religions. We need not surely crave a tender or merciful treatment for that faith which we hold to be the only true one
It is necessary that we too should see the beam in our own eyes, and learn to distin- guish between the Christianity of the nineteenth century and the religion of Christ
Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states
If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. It may seem almost like a truism, that no religion can continue to be what it was during the lifetime of its founder and its first apostles
If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to IndiaMax MüllerGerman-born philologist and Orientalist ( The Science of Thought) (Born this day 1823) When a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word
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